For one, normal human can do long division as fast as a calculator, and can handle numbers that will bork many calculators. (edit - look at human calculators, and the era before calculators were common place. Even now elders I know can eye ball numbers and calculate percentages / factorials and ratios)
And for another, Calculation != AI, far from actually.
>In 1977, at Southern Methodist University, she gave the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in 50 seconds.[1][4] Her answer—546,372,891—was confirmed by calculations done at the US Bureau of Standards by the UNIVAC 1101 computer, for which a special program had to be written to perform such a large calculation.[10]
She could easily out-perform calculators because she never needed time to key in the commands (she needs to hear the problem to solve it).
If we exclude that restriction, and the commands magically float into the calculator, and that the problem is small enough to match the calculators limits, then yes, if those arbitrary conditions are met the calculator can out-perform her brain.
Which is precisely the type of “cows are round spheres” thinking that’s being decried in the article.
People can and regularly do out-perform calculators in speed, energy and complexity of computation.
Do note that calculators weren’t allowed as exam tools in a lot of countries till a decade or so ago. Students learnt mental math techniques which were known since ancient times (think Greece).
For a human brain the answer isn’t even calculation, it becomes pattern recognition. The square root of 25 is 5, which takes about the same neural load as it takes to recognize a letter.
The calculation you provided is harder, but thats a function of lack of training/practice, not complexity.
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AI is not in the realm of what a calculator can pull off, is what I meant to say by the compute part.
edit: I tried your computation on a store calculator, its beyond its ability to calculate,(0.0000000027)
Your example is from 1977, we've had 40 years of Moore's law since then. In the time it takes for you to recognise that you're even looking at a number (~0.08 seconds), the cheapest computer you can buy (the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero) can do around 1.92 billion normal floating maths operations. Sure, 201-digit numbers are a little slower — on my laptop, in Python, I can only do that particular calculation just under one hundred million times in the fifty seconds it took her to do it once.
But you're right to say calculators are single purpose devices and that's magically inserting the question.
So I downloaded sklearn, which contains a set of labelled hand-written digits.
It takes about 0.17-0.2 seconds for my laptop to learn to read numbers, from scratch, and thereafter it can read digits at a rate of about 8,200 per second.
For reference, "a blink of an eye" is 0.1-0.4 seconds depending on who you ask.
Dollar store calculator? I'd never have said that myself because I know calculators are rubbish. But in the context of "AI: Will it ever beat humans?" hell yes, it will and in many cases it already does.
There is the practice of anzan in China and Japan, which shifts the burden of calculation into the visual cortex by visualizing a mental abacus. Thus advanced practitioners can rapidly and correctly evaluate calculations like the one you have given. As you can see, Tsujikubo's speed in divisions appears to be limited in her ability to physically write out the answer.
Granted, these are people at the top of their game, so may not qualify as "normal" per your argument, but this is to illustrate that the limits of numerical calculation in "normal" people may be the algorithms we are taught rather than the computational capacity of our brains.
And for another, Calculation != AI, far from actually.